Learn to create a segment using your Web Behavior Tracking data.
Overview
Great email marketing relies on sending relevant content to your contacts. Your data is crucial to this and the richer it is, and the more intelligently you can use it, the more effective your marketing is.
Our Web Behavior Tracking module gives you a powerful tool to target and engage your customers based on their browsing behaviour and activity.
Suppose you're an ecommerce site looking to rescue your abandoned carts or make the most of insight into viewed product pages. Then Web Behavior Tracking lets you target these contacts with relevant content.
Sending the right contacts the appropriate product recommendations or offers dramatically increases the likelihood that they'll be back to complete a purchase. It goes a long way in improving your customer service; making your business look better in your contacts' eyes while increasing customer loyalty.
It's not just ecommerce
Of course, this same logic above doesn't just apply specifically to an ecommerce business' needs and the selling of a physical product. It can also apply to targeting contacts who haven't followed through when viewing a page containing a signup, subscription, or enquiry form. Another example could be when a contact has browsed a page containing downloadable material, but yet they haven't committed to the download.
To learn more, check out the articles:
Before you start
Things you need to know:
- You must have Web Behavior Tracking installed.
- If you're new to segmentation, check out the article Segmentation overview.
Create a Web Behavior Tracking segment
Web Behavior Tracking segments are created in much the same way as normal segments, with just a few differences here and there owing to the differing nature of the data.
Go to Contacts > Segments and click on New segment to use the segmentation builder, providing a segment name in the usual way:
Once you've named it and clicked Continue, drag and drop Web Behavior Tracking from underneath ‘Data’ in the right-hand side panel into either one of the editing areas:
Next, click on [click to select WebInsight data] in the editing area to open the Web Behavior Tracking data editing window:
If you’re familiar with using segmentation already, this allows you to construct your segment rules in the usual way but with a few differences.
There are two parts of a Web Behavior Tracking rule – a contact filter and a transactional filter. The contact filter selects the contacts that meet the conditions of your rule. A transactional filter will then add further criteria to the browsing activities of contacts for inclusion within the count or sum as specified within the initial contact filter condition of your rule.
The contact filter firstly requires you to choose whether your rule is a ‘Number of’ statement or a ‘Total of’ statement:
Switching between the radio buttons will change the statement below it accordingly.
Selecting 'Number of' will construct a rule stating 'the number of transactions [comparison operator] N', so, for example, 'the number of transactions is greater than or equal to 1'. This means the segment will count contacts who have at least one example of a browser session.
Please note: The example that follows uses ' Number of' as a contact filter. An example of using 'Total of' as a contact filter is outlined under 'A flexible and powerful tool!'
The following is a very simple example of creating a Web Behavior Tracking segment based on the data of customers who have visited a certain area of your website. Let’s say you want to discover who has browsed your autumn offers product pages, so you can target them with not only the products they viewed but also related product recommendations they might be interested in.
You will want to create the rule by firstly setting your contact filter as ‘The number of transactions must be more than 1’. This is done by selecting the ‘Number of’ radio button, followed by ‘More than’ from the comparison operator selection box:
The full choice of comparison operators are
- is equal to
- is not equal to
- is more than
- is less than
- is greater than or equal to
- is less than or equal to
- starts with
- is between
Next you will need to select ‘1’ from the numerical stepper (clicking the up and down arrows will increment the number accordingly):
Selecting ‘is between’ as a comparison operator will produce two numerical stepper boxes so you can choose the desired range.
After setting this, the next step is to create the appropriate rule in the transactional filter selector. Here you will want to create your rule by selecting the Web Behavior Tracking data field of 'page_url' under 'page_viewed' -
- followed by selecting the comparison operator ‘starts with’ -
- and then entering the page's URL:
You can of course increase the number of transaction filters your segment uses should you wish to, up to an additional seven, thus constructing more complex queries. For instance, you could add an additional filter here of 'Duration' being equal to or greater than one minute, which would ensure you only include contacts who have genuinely had a good look at this page and not just simply clicked through and then away within seconds.
You can delete any of these transaction filters at any point by clicking on the red cross next to the filter on the far right.
You can also cancel a selected transaction filter and choose a different one by clicking on the red cross next to it in the Web Behavior Tracking data field selector box.
For the purposes of this demonstration, your Web Behavior Tracking rule is now set. Click OK to close the Web Behavior Tracking data editing window and view your rule as a sentence:
Next, click Save in the top right which will automatically generate a count for you whilst saving. At this stage, your Web Behavior Tracking segment has been created and will now be listed with all of your other segments under ‘Segments’.
The count of your segment will be displayed in the bottom left.
Click [View contacts] to see the contacts in your Web Behavior Tracking segment.
Select the Edit pencil icon, which allows you to view the Web Behavior Tracking data for the contact. Click on a particular browsing session transaction from the list to view its details on the right.
The example above displays the contacts' individual page views and the visit time in their session (the overall session being classed as a transaction with an accompanying ID). By scrolling down, the rest of the information about the contact and the browser session is provided:
The Web Behavior Tracking segmentation editing tool gives you plenty of flexibility to make more complex, powerful rules to greatly increase the accuracy of your campaign targeting. In the example above we've demonstrated looking at selecting ‘Number of’ for the contact filter but you can also select ‘Total of’ for a different type of rule. As it's based on a sum of a Web Behavior Tracking data field, the types of Web Behavior Tracking data fields available for selection necessarily change to those of number types. Let's say, for example, you're looking for contacts who have spent at least five minutes visiting pages on your site. You can select the data field 'Duration' to make the contact filter statement change as follows:
You can select your Web Behavior Tracking data field of choice from the dropdown, and can cancel the choice using the red cross next to it. The choice of comparison operators are the same as ‘Number of’:
- is equal to
- is not equal to
- is more than
- is less than
- is greater than or equal to
- is less than or equal to
- starts with
- is between
When using transaction filters, the comparison operators change depending upon the Web Behavior Tracking data field selected, and thus so does the value input box depending upon the data value type of the data field.
For instance, if you select a Web Behavior Tracking data field of VisitTime, which has a value type of date, then the comparison operators will change accordingly to accommodate this. This then provides you will all sorts of possibilities to filter behavior according to a date, in or around a date or within a date range:
Exclude and include
Of course, exclusions can be added to your Web Behavior Tracking segment's rules, meaning you could exclude a certain product page or pages for autumn offers whilst including others. This would be useful if you were looking to increase sales for your lower selling products, as you could target those contacts who only specifically viewed such lower selling product pages, whilst excluding contacts who have viewed the better selling product pages. In the example below, the better selling products are all in the running and football departments:
Combine with OrderInsight
Furthermore, if you are an eCommerce business and also have the OrderInsight module enabled, you can of course introduce this extra data into your segment too, making even more powerful segments that combine contacts' browsing behavior with their purchasing history.